Leading With Content

By now, you’ve probably seen that only quality content is king when it comes to online or offline profitability. What you might now have seen is how powerful content becomes, in terms of profit, when you give it away. Yes, you read that correctly. In today’s digitally social world, giving away quality information is the number one way to establish trust, generate leads and make sales. Let’s take a closer look at how this process works and why.

How It Works

If you decide to lead with content, your first step is to produce quality content with a high information value. (At this point, we will assume you already have a branded website for your business, as well as the other necessary pieces of software/hardware for this website, such as an auto responder account.) This content can take any form. It can be blog posts, articles or instructional videos. The main point is that the information contained in this content is a valuable as you can possibly make it.
Once you have produced the content, you need to put this content on your website. Include any other helpful information a viewer or visitor may need on this page. Most importantly, include a link on the page that a visitor can use to request more information or, alternatively, to be alerted when you post additional free content. The idea is that anyone who visits the page can access the information easily and also has the option to get more information, should they so choose, in exchange for contact information. The idea is to make the gathering of the contact information as subtle and natural as possible. Your visitors exercise the option for more info or an alert and your autoresponder’s opt-in page gathers the contact information in a low key, non-sales oriented way.
Once you have the content loaded on your site and your autoresponder set up to gather opt in information, you’re ready to direct traffic to your site. You can do this through social media marketing, for example by blogging and then posting a link to your blog post on social media sites or including a link to your free content in your social media profiles, doing SEO (search engine optimization) on your main site, including the URL of your site in your email signature and using paid ad traffic. While in-depth details of all of these topics are beyond the subject of this book, suffice it to say that the traffic driven to your page through these methods is what provides you the opt-in contact information that becomes your leads.

Why Lead Generation Using Content Works

Leading with content that your audience would like to have is a form of inbound marketing. As we discussed in my post first post in this series, inbound marketing techniques seek to establish a dialogue with potential customers prior to making a sales offer. This initial dialogue, especially when seen as valuable by a potential customer, establishes trust between them and your business. They see your business in a positive light because they have approached you for information and have found that information valuable. Therefore, when you do send them a well-timed offer based on your content, they are much more likely to become paying customers because of this pre-established trust and interest.

Takeaways for This Section

• How Leading With Content Works;
  • You produce quality content for your site with an extremely high informational value;
  • You post this content on your website and direct traffic to the site using various methods, including social media marketing, SEO and paid ad traffic;
  • As a result of these direct traffic efforts, the number of visitors to your site increases;
  • These visitors can choose to provide contact information in exchange for even more content;
  • This content information becomes your leads.
• Why Leading With Content Works;
  • Leading with content establishes a dialogue with potential customers prior to a sales offer being made;
  • This dialogue, in turn, establishes trust between these potential customers and your business;
  • This trust raises the likelihood that potential customers will respond positively once a sales offer is made.

Lead Generation Using Survey Method

The Survey Method is a potent way for collecting leads that are right on the money. It relies on a very powerful psychological tool to quickly and easily gather contact information from the survey participants. Best of all, the subject of the survey is directly relevant to the product or service your business is selling. Therefore, each contact you collect through this method is already warm and ready to become your customer. Here’s how it works.
Let’s face it; most people are interested in themselves. While they wouldn’t want to admit this fact to anyone, it’s still true. Because of this, you, as a marketer, can indirectly appeal to their vanity, and obtain their contact information, through the use of a simple survey. Let’s take a look at an example.
Let’s say you’re offering a product based around Kindle publishing. Your target audience for this product is, obviously, people who want to earn money through writing. Most writers are interested in reading and in other authors, so you fashion a simple survey designed to tell the participants of the survey which famous author they are most like. This survey appeals directly to the desire of your target audience to become an author and, as a corollary, be a famous author.
Designing the survey is easy. Simply Google “online survey software” and you’ll find dozens of results that will suit your needs. The software itself will automate both the creation of the survey and its packaging. All you have to do is come up with eight or ten clever and funny survey questions, the famous authors who’ll be the result of taking the survey and whether you’ll be asking for content information prior to taking the survey or after.
In addition, you also want to provide each participant with the option to share the results of their survey on Facebook and other social media. If they do, their list of friends on that social media outlet will get a message that says “Hey, I’m Edgar Allen Poe. Who are you?” with a link back to the survey, so that anyone who receives this message can take the survey and share the results as well.
Once the survey is complete, you post it on your business branded Facebook account (if you don’t have one, create one) and direct traffic to that post through the usual means (paid Facebook ads, social media channels, etc.). This traffic will mean that people will begin to take the survey and share the results. These shares will generate even more traffic to the survey. Every person who takes the survey will provide contact information directly to you. In addition, a high percentage of these people will be die hard readers and closet authors. Thus, when you send an offer regarding your Kindle publishing product to these leads, it will convert like crazy and your sales will go through the roof.
As long as you make the survey relevant to your product or service, you can repeat this process over and over again, with spectacular sales resulting out the leads you’ve generated.

Takeaways for Surveys

• The Survey Method is so powerful because it indirectly appeals to the participants vanity and fantasies;
• A survey is extremely easy to put together using online survey software;
• The survey you produce should be relevant to the product or service you will eventually be selling to the participants;
• Make sure that you allow the participants to “share” their results through social media outlets.

Lead Generation Using Free Bonus on Related Products

When someone buys something, they are already psychologically in a place where a) they have decided to take action on a problem, obtain help to satisfy a need; and b) they have decided to spend money to achieve this end. When you offer a free bonus on a related product that someone has already decided to buy, or has already bought, you take advantage of this mental state and are easily able to establish trust, obtain contact information and, eventually, make sales. Here’s how it works.
Your bonus can be anything, a pdf guide, a video or a report. You need to find another marketer who has a product closely related to the subject of this free bonus. This marketer will want to include your bonus in their sales funnel because it’s a bonus. They provide a benefit to their customers, as well as drive sales, at no cost or effort on their part. You bonus is then offered as an extra on the original product’s download page in exchange for the buyer’s contact information. The idea is that because they have already purchased the original product, they will absolutely want an additional product that helps them obtain better results when they use this purchase.
When you offer a free bonus on a related product, it’s a win/win for you as a marketer. Your bonus provides extra value to the original marketer’s clients. This establishes goodwill and trust between you and both parties. In addition, in order to obtain the bonus, these clients have to providing contact information. This contact information provides you with a boatload of solid leads who are already interested in what you have to sell.

Takeaways from This Section

• Using a free bonus on a related product produces excellent results precisely because the two products are related;
• People who have already purchased one product are very willing to take advantage of a free product that enhances their use of the original purchase;
• Your bonus establishes trust between you and the marketer selling the original product;
• Your bonus establishes trust between you and the clients of the marketer selling the original product;
• You grow your sales list with every client who takes advantage of the bonus and this means greater future sales for you.

Conclusion

We’ve taken a look at some extremely innovative ways to generate leads here and in my last two posts (Lead Generation Interview Method A & Lead Generation Interview Method B). These methods have been tested and are used by countless successful marketers to achieve stunning success product after product, year after year.
Why? Because these strategies work to produce high quality leads for very little upfront work. These leads, when used correctly, are money in the bank. If you’re in the business of earning income as a result of your online marketing efforts, then you owe it to yourself and your bottom line to put these methods to work for you today.
The next and final blog post in this series will be on using LinkedIn for lead generation – so stay tuned!